Protecting its backyard – India is watching Chinese forays in the Indian Ocean

That China has fostered designs on the Indian Ocean, specially the Bay of Bengal region for some time now, is hardly a state secret.

Beijing’s planned building of a deep sea port in Kyaukpyu in Myanmar, its taking over of the Hambantota port from Sri Lanka on a 99-year lease in exchange for a $1.8 billion loan, assistance to Pakistanis to build the Gwadar port and funding of the Chittagong deep sea port in Bangladesh, leaves nothing to imagination.

It now turns out that the Chinese Navy has sent at least eight submarine missions since 2013 in the Indian Ocean region and has occasionally closed in on Indian waters, getting as near as Colombo and Karachi, according to details revealed by this paper.

Intelligence reports suggest that each mission lasted for nearly a month. The deployments included both nuclear and non-nuclear submarines, backed, of course, by a regular ship. Read More